Windows Azure is the Platform as a Service offering from Microsoft. Though it started as the preferred Cloud platform for .NET developers, it has come a long way to become a true polyglot PaaS. Windows Azure supports running .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js and even PERL, Ruby, Python and othe...

Despite Microsoft's best efforts to "engineer compatibility" between its Hyper-V virtualisation software and the OpenStack open source cloud project since October 2010, it appears that may have run out for the Redmond software giant. Adrian Bridgwater

1. VDI on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V: Performance Monitoring Explained–Part 1 This post discusses best practices for VDI (virtual desktop interface) monitoring on Windows Server Hyper-V. It tells you which counters to utilize to determine whether your VM is overloaded, focusing on ...

Good morning, all. I interrupt the normal cadence of this blog to bring to you just a little bit of bragging. And a challenge. “Oh great.. what did you do now, Kevin?” imageThis week I’m in Seattle, Washington, attending Microsoft’s bi-annual internal technical training event, “Tec...

In 2000, Microsoft announced that it is building a brand new runtime and a framework called .NET. At the heart of .NET was the Common Language Runtime (CLR) designed to execute an assembly like language known as Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL). This was at a time when Sun was tr...

Microsoft Corp. today announced that Microsoft Office 365, the company's next-generation cloud productivity service, is the first and only major cloud-based platform to offer leading information privacy and security standards for customers operating in the European Union and United Sta...

Today Microsoft made major announcements on the pricing of System Center 2012. It's now one product, just two SKUs. Today during the "Private Cloud Day" live webcast event, Microsoft announced major change in how we think of and purchase the System Center suite. Summary.. it's no long...

This article is about How Kinect and Surface 2.0 will have impact on the retail experience. From Microsoft Press releases. Throughout the retail and hospitality industries one axiom reigns supreme: The customer is always right. Though dating back to the 19th century, it remains a hall...

was asked this question last week at our TechNet Event in Kansas City. “What is Microsoft’s best practice recommendation for web server deployment to support a web site that has variable demands from day-to-day? Network Load-Balancing? Private Cloud? Clustering?.. or something els...

It’s another snowy day up here in Minneapolis, but earlier this week I had the pleasure of traveling down to tropical Kansas City. Overland Park, KS, to be more specific. And on that particular day we decided to try something new. We (John Weston and I) asked our attendees to write ...

So I’ve been living under a rock again and I had never gotten around to checking what’s new in Visual Studio 11. The Developer Preview has been around a while and I wanted to check it out today and was surprised to see some new SharePoint development features that I am really excited ...

Critics have always accused Microsoft of copying UI from Apple. As Chris Madden in this interesting post point out that Apple fans state that: “…every Mac OS feature and icon eventually shows up in Windows (and in fairness many do)…” First time Microsoft came up with a revolutionary ...

After our previous article “XenDesktop on Microsoft Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V: Best Practices”, we decided to expand on this series and post some additional articles that are more specific to Hyper-V itself and in particular, tuning performance of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. We’ll dis...

Please hold your skepticism, keep an open mind, go through the following points and only then pass a judgment on my prediction that “three years down Windows Phone would have overtaken Android." The UI is different but very well designed for mobile and tablet. The same view is express...

PC management from the Cloud. Microsoft Intune is a cloud based service that allows you to remotely manage your desktops. Windows Intune simplifies and helps businesses manage and secure PCs using Windows®cloud services and Windows 7. Windows Intune includes both the cloud service for...

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, Microsoft's end-to-end service-management product, is your best choice for Windows environments. It works seamlessly with Microsoft infrastructure servers, such as Windows Server, and application servers, such as Microsoft Exchange, helping you...

Microsoft has shown once again that it can act decisively and smartly improve its offerings in doing so. It has “disrupted” itself in a way that will be positive for the community and probably the Microsoft bottom line. In a November 11 blog post, Microsoft announced that it would not...

A long time ago when I first started working with MaXware Identity Center, I had to pass a hands-on test to demonstrate my proficiency with Identity Center and Virtual Directory. The part of this whole exam that scared me the most was provisioning to Microsoft Exchange. Long story sho...

With all the applications .NET allows you to create—from customer relationship management and product inventory applications to websites and cloud partnerships, to name just a few, you can't afford for your .NET applications to go down. It could cost millions in lost revenue directly t...

At SharePoint Conference 2011, I showed off a great looking advanced search application using Silverlight 4. This application queried the Search web service at /_vti_bin/search.asmx to retrieve results and display them directly inside the application. A couple of years ago, I demonst...

Yesterday I taught an intro to PowerBuilder .NET 12.5 session. Part of the presentation had me comparing the.NET IL code inside an assemblies generated from code written in C# and PowerBuilder. The C# code, after performing a simple arithmetic calculation echoed results to the cons...

Last week, InformationWeek quoted a Microsoft manager as saying there was “No chance” Windows XP would get another stay of execution. This really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, it was only the backlash from enterprises that kept Microsoft from ending support for XP over the last se...

Time and again, we witness, when a program goes into acceptance testing phase, the client and teams suddenly realize that the application is not meeting the Non-Functional requirements. Usually the application is very slow, or it is frequently going down or not scaling up as expected. ...

Most of my posts lately have only been delivering bad news about BUILDS affects on our Silverlight and WPF projects. Instead of dropping 2 Silverlight and 1 WPF project, we will only be dropping one Silverlight project. I am lucky enough to work with some very bright people.

“For every dollar spent on licensing fees, companies in general have spent $6-$9 on third-party add-on tools and additional services for SharePoint.” At the SharePoint conference, we sat down with Steve Bystran, SVP of GSX Solutions to ask how GSX Monitor and Analyzer solve the majori...

Sometimes, it is good to get back to the basics. This may seem like a simple task for many of you, but there are many that don’t fully understand what is behind setting up a file share and the required permissions. Years ago, I always thought I understood how this worked. However, a...

This past weekend, I was live on Blog Talk Radio to talk more about the lessons of Steve Jobs departure, Jeff Bridges’ album tanking, and the philosophy that “ALL Business is Show Business.” Listen in — and I hope you enjoy! (ONE MORE THING — as Steve Jobs would say — I want to start...

There are many technical articles/blogs on the web that jump straight into areas of .NET code you can instantly optimize and tune. Before we get to some of those areas, it’s good to take a step back and ask yourself, “Why am I here?” Are you interested in tuning your app, which is slow...

It’s official! eLearnIT and ISUG are hosting a full-day PowerBuilder 12.5 .NET Jumpstart Workshop at TechWave Pre-Con in Las Vegas. n this fully loaded day I’ll be ‘Powering’ you through building a complete partitioned multi-tiered WPF business application, from ‘soup to nuts.’ I’m to...

This is true not only in absolute dollar term but also true as a percentage of revenue. In fact, Microsoft spends more on R&D among all the IT and software companies – in both absolute dollar terms as well as percentage of revenue. Have a look at the data below. I have picked it up fr...

The cloud hype machine is well and truly in full swing these days; it seems every tech company out there is telling you they are in the cloud and their products are cloud-based. A lot of that is marketing spin - cloud is the buzzword that people want to be associated with at the moment...

When you are installing SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1), you might encounter the following error multiple times during the installation. An unhandled exception (‘System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException’) occurred in OWSTIMER.EXE [3004]. This has been known to occur j...

My first Service Pack 1 (SP1) installation experience (since release) went fairly smoothly. I mentioned one minor issue you will see already during the install if you have Visual Studio installed. However, this issue next issue took me a bit longer to fix. When I went to open the Po...

This week PBDJ will publish part one of a series of articles I am writing called “PowerBuilder .NET RESTful Web Services: A quick-start how-to guide”. I’m also producing an accompanying video demo series. To get the buzz going here's a release candidate for the complete video that w...

Several industry predictions point to an explosion of tablets as the most favored productivity device for the enterprise and the consumer. The analysts have predicted a worldwide increase in usage for tablets. The biggest advantages of tablets is that they are lightweight yet powerful...

To me having information is knowledge, knowing what to do with the knowledge is wisdom. I see a whole lot of knowledge these days, but very little wisdom. As long as the shortcut to the end result continues to be taken, our industry is going to continue to produce garbage, but I gues...

Can you think of a product category where one organization, in an open market, has maintained complete global dominance with 90%+ market share for close to 30 years? The only one that comes to my mind is “Operating System for PC”. Can you think of another? The other one which comes cl...

Last week we saw Microsoft paying an unheard of price of $8.5B to acquire Skype, the free VoIP company from Europe. When eBay bought Skype few years ago for something like $2.3B, we thought that was crazy. The theory seemed sensible to some folks – auctioning parties can talk using Sky...

Microsoft and Skype announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will acquire Skype, the leading Internet communications company, for $8.5 billion in cash from the investor group led by Silver Lake. The agreement has been approved by the boards of ...